I ran 3.0 and it looked normal to me, then someone said I should play 2.3 since it was more stable. So, now I am playing it, but the town is all dark, and I don't even see a torch radius if I wield one.

Are my settings messed up? I keep walking around the town, bumping into buildings to find their outlines. I figured maybe it was night and I had to wield a torch, but that didn't help.

I have played Angband for years, so you are all probably laughing at me right now wondering what is wrong with me...

So, now I went down the stairs in the town and killed everything, and came back up and now there is no light again and I can't see the outlines of the buildings. I must be doing something wrong... Is there some online help somewhere for ToME beginners? I found an essence of something in town, wands have goofy numbers next to them.

I am sure I will greatly enjoy this if I can figure it out without reading a book.

As pointed out, you should try the official tome forums, where you might get more help.

Regarding your problem, I ran into something similar, when running the game under Windows 7. I did not try too hard to solve the problem, so I have no solution to offer, unfortunately.

I thought someone said the ToME forums were dead or hacked or something... I can try there, I just value everyone here since I've followed this site recently.

The dungeon didn't have "."'s either. Very weird, I could see my light effect on the walls, but the floor tiles did not show, and the little "p"'s running around in the dungeon appeared sporadically, as if they had some temporary invisible at times, especially that darn bandit. Once, I saw him way down the first hallway, and other times I could not see him until I was 2 squares away.

I also saw that ToME had some weird effects with Vista and I'm assuming Windows 7, so maybe that is it too...

That does sound very odd - you would try deleting / remnaming the win.prf filed in the Pref folder - that works for some variants if the graphics are being odd for XP. Also, after deactivating the pref files, try toggling the graphics options in the menu-bar...

It sounds to me like the graphic for '.' is missing somehow. I don't know how to go about debugging that issue. You should still need to wield a light source as normal (Vampires have an inherent radius-1 light, but every other race/class combination needs to provide their own), and it should illuminate things as normal.

Some enemies in the dungeon carry their own light sources, which would explain why you can see them from a distance.

Essences are for alchemy; you can safely delete them. Alchemy is only available to Alchemists (naturally), and is very broken.

If I recall correctly, the numbers next to wands are their min and max spell levels -- so a wand of Manathrust (1|15) can cast Manathrust anywhere from level 1 to level 15, depending on your Magic Device skill. I could be wrong though. You will want to invest at least around 15-20 points in Magic Device so you can activate rods and artifacts reliably; might as well do it early and get some mileage out of wands while you're at it.

Like someone mentioned, it's the win "font-win.prf" file. You can either delete it, and live with all-ascii visuals, or edit it and comment out the lines affecting the ground tiles. They have obvious names like sand and cobblestones etc. Just add a "#" before the lines in question.